Hold

by Kirsten Tranter

  I told him to sit down. He grimaced at the uncomfortable seat, but he was smiling too. The evening came on quickly while we sat there. ‘Are you staying?’ he asked. ‘I’ll keep the milk crates. But we’ll need to go inside to eat. They’re fucking terrible to sit on.’

  When I went inside to the bathroom later to brush my teeth before bed, I opened the cabinet above the sink, looking for toothpaste. It was the third or fourth time I had stayed. On the highest shelf, a narrow slab of glass, was a pair of earrings. They couldn’t have belonged to his daughter Janie. They were made of pearl and silver and looked expensive. I lifted them, held them in my palm, feeling a decisive, surprising stab of resentment, and felt an impulse to throw them into the toilet. Then I thought about what it would be like if they became stuck there and refused to flush, and the gesture would be exposed.

  Pearl earrings. I wondered what their owner thought about the milk crates. She probably never went out to the balcony. It was winter, after all.

  I had handed the earrings to David in the bedroom. He started to speak, and I stopped him. ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘I would like for these not to be here.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘And for them not to show up again.’

  He nodded and closed his hand around them. That was how it happened, my declaration of intent to stay. I fell asleep thinking of the steely blue slice of water, the safely contained bay, waveless and deep and calm, far below.

  We brought the milk crates to the new house and put them on the rickety Victorian balcony, alongside a couple of painted wicker chairs. When David joined me there, the first night we spent in the house, it felt like a familiar ritual, something that belonged to us and defined us. He brought a bottle of champagne and we drank it out of tumblers because his champagne flutes were still packed away in an unlocatable box. ‘Let’s do this every night,’ I said, and lifted my feet to rest against the wrought-iron railing. The view from here was of houses and red-tiled roofs, tall jacaranda trees in full purple bloom, elegant eucalypts, the grand fronds of palm trees here and there. We knew the water wasn’t too far away; all the eastern suburbs were tinged with that knowledge, and cooled by just a couple of degrees by its proximity, but it was far out of sight and I ignoredit. David yawned and stretched. He had pulled a muscle in his back, shifting the bed into place. It was a warm evening, the first week of November, and the sky was pink and mauve, a couple of stars showing. I bought a jasmine plant in a pot a few days after that and put it on one of the milk crates. I looked at it now and noticed the parched, crumbly soil and leaves starting to edge with brown.

  *

  David was late getting home with Janie. By six-thirty I had given up waiting and opened a bottle of wine, the cheap riesling I secretly liked better than the expensive sancerre David ordered in by the dozen. The door slammed shut followed by the thud of a schoolbag hitting the floor and then footsteps hurrying upstairs. It was Wednesday, the first of three nights Janie stayed with us every week. She was fifteen, the only child from David’s previous marriage.

  I poured a glass for him and took it over to the couch where he had thrown himself, legs sprawled out. His ankles stuck out from the bottom of his suit, making the trousers seem comically short.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, and caught my wrist gently, pulling me to him.

  I kissed him and sat next to him. ‘Did you get stuck in traffic?’

  ‘Yes — sort of.’ His hair was damp from the rain. A storm had broken late in the afternoon, sending the chill of the southerly through the house, loosening the pressure in the air.

  ‘Janie wasn’t there when I went to collect her from ballet,’ he said. ‘Apparently it was cancelled and she left me a message, which I didn’t receive until I got there — it’s too complicated. It shouldn’t have been that complicated. She went shopping with Elise and that other friend of hers. We had an argument on the phone.’

  ‘But you caught up with her eventually.’

  He took a drink from his glass and straightened up, resting one arm along the back of the couch. ‘What are we drinking?’ he asked. He wanted to frown, I could tell, but he smiled instead. ‘I picked her up from a coffee shop on Oxford Street.’

  ‘How was work?’ I asked, feeling that odd sensation of performing a role, the wife who is waiting at home with a drink and slippers ready for the man to return from the world of activity and employment. I felt this even though I worked too; I’d spent the day in my office upstairs redoing the designs I’d sent in a few days earlier, hours on the phone and email with the publisher going over exactly what their problems were, exactly how much the budget had changed, how many images there would be, the weight of the paper in the pages of the book. It was an illustrated history of anatomy, filled with pictures of organs, bones and blood vessels drawn differently through the ages, skeletons in knowing poses framing scenes of evisceration. ‘How did that meeting go this morning?’

  He shook his head and told me about it, grateful to change the subject. A junior lecturer, one he’d been involved with hiring, was having problems getting tenure. He was having to call in favours to make sure she kept her job.

  ‘Is it worth it, whatever you’re having to do to keep her? I hope she appreciates it.’

  He smiled. ‘She’ll be forever in my debt.’

  ‘You make her sound like a damsel in distress.’

  ‘She certainly will be if this vote goes the wrong way.’

  My glass was almost empty. I wanted to ask more about the woman, but told myself that the situation was more about David asserting his own power in the department than the pleasure of incurring obligation from young colleagues. I had seen her picture on the department website, ethereal and blonde with a cloud of fine hair that drifted around her head as though charged with static electricity. Her teeth looked too large for her smile, too big for her body.

  Half an hour later Janie thumped downstairs. She had changed out of her school uniform into black leggings.

  ‘Is that my cardigan?’ I asked her. My clothes had started disappearing since the move, and I wasn’t sure whether it was my fault, misplacing things in the new arrangements of drawers and shelves and closets, or because of Janie. It was mostly things I couldn’t imagine Janie wearing. But then I looked more closely at the way she had transformed my plain grey cardigan into a fashion item, buttoned and draped in a way that threatened to slip off her thin shoulders at any moment, and wondered.

  Janie pulled her long hair up into a ponytail, snapping the elastic. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked. ‘My bag got wet in the rain. Everything else up there needs to go in the wash.’

  I knew it was hard on her, living between two houses. She made a point of never saying so outright. I stopped myself from asking if she wanted me to put anything in the dryer. David and I had agreed it was time for her to start acting more responsibly around the house.

  Janie stepped to the island in the kitchen with her dancer’s stride, as though she were approaching a ballet bar. We had taken out the original walls between the kitchen and the two front rooms, so the downstairs part of the house was one big space. Open plan. There were times I regretted it, hating the noise of Janie’s television programs on the nights she was with us. In my old house I’d spent more time in the kitchen than anywhere else, drinking tea or wine at the table in the corner in the sun. Now it felt like a fishbowl.

  Janie lifted the bottle of wine I’d left on the island. There was an empty tumbler next to it.

  ‘Janie,’ I said, and looked at David to see whether he’d noticed.

  ‘I was just putting this back in the fridge for you,’ she said, tilting her head and smiling. ‘Or do you need a refill, Shelley? By the way, is something burning?’

  ‘Fuck.’ I pushed past her to the oven, reproaching myself for swearing. Smoke escaped when I opened the door. Duck breasts, ruined. ‘Bloody hell. Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Is there something wrong with this oven?’ David leaned further back into the couch. ‘It
cost more than the rest of the kitchen.’

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m still getting used to it.’

  David reached for the phone. ‘Get someone to come and have a look at it. I’ll ring the Thai place for takeaway. What do you want, Shelley? Janie?’

  Janie was halfway to the stairs. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she called out.

  ‘Janie!’ David called back, raising his voice, and paused for a moment before standing. ‘Can you call the restaurant?’ he asked, his eyes barely meeting mine, before heading upstairs.

  The menu was attached to the front of the fridge with a magnet advertising the brand of our dishwasher. I pulled it down and opened the fridge to retrieve the wine. The bottle was emptier than it had been when I’d poured David’s glass, and the tumbler on the counter was gone. It was a pattern I was starting to recognise, and I had started paying attention to the level of wine in a bottle if I put one away at the end of an evening, checking it again the next day. It was always hard to be sure and I hated feeling like I was mounting some kind of surveillance. I emptied the rest of the bottle into my glass, filling it up to the brim, and spilled a drop when I picked it up. The sound of David’s voice travelled down from the floor above, with no response from his daughter. I called in our order.

  *

  Half the evening was lost to their argument in the end. When I went to bed David was still on the phone to Gwen, Janie’s mother, devising new rules, new threats. There they were, talking about Janie, while I, the usurper, was alone. It was hard not to admire her manipulations, in a way, her passive refusals that provoked so much in the way of response. She had achieved such impressive results with such minimal action.

  I switched on the lamp on my side of the bed. I had forgotten to tell David about the extra room and the hidden door. Thinking about the room felt strangely comforting. Despite my tiredness I felt an urge to go in there, to see the rich crimson walls and watch the chandelier brighten when I pulled the cord. I would tell him tomorrow, I decided, and work out how to fix the glass drop back onto the chandelier, and decide how to furnish it. We didn’t need an extra room, really. I imagined myself lying in the room on a sofa, reading, or sewing, though I never sewed. Embroidering? Something about the Victorian aspect of the room inspired these images of myself engaged in old-fashioned, ladylike activities.

  *

  The next day David went straight from work to a dinner with some visiting academics from London. I spent a tense evening at the table with Janie, finishing the previous night’s leftovers. Janie watched every sip of wine I drank and ate every grain of rice from her carefully measured portions, her phone face down next to her plate. It buzzed once. She ignored it and picked it up again as soon as her plate was cleared away, texting busily as she went back upstairs.

  When David arrived home I was already dressed for bed. He kissed me, smelling of red wine and cigarettes.

  ‘I forgot to tell you yesterday,’ I said. ‘I found an extra room.’

  He squinted at me. ‘Extra room for what?’

  ‘No, an extra room. Another room in the house.’

  He pulled back, loosening his tie.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I offered.

  ‘That’s the closet,’ he said when he saw where I was going, and yawned.

  ‘Come and see.’ I parted the hanging clothes. For a second, as I pushed the hangers aside to show the door, I worried that I had imagined it after all, or that the door would have magically disappeared. But there it was, just as I’d remembered, flush with the wall, the sheen of paint on it.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ he asked.

  ‘A door — see?’

  ‘Right.’ He stepped towards it. ‘And there’s another room through here? Isn’t that the neighbours’ house on that side of the wall?’

  ‘No, it’s on our side. Open it.’

  ‘The handle’s broken.’

  ‘Just push it.’

  He pushed it, but it didn’t open. ‘It opened yesterday,’ I said. ‘Try again.’

  He tried again. He bent down to inspect the marks and holes where the handle had once been, and shook his head.

  ‘It could be the weather,’ I suggested. ‘The wood’s swollen and stuck or something.’

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I mean, just a fireplace. It’s empty.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘It would be nice to have an extra bathroom. An en suite.’

  ‘An en suite?’ It was impossible to imagine the room being changed in that way — holes made in the walls for plumbing, the fireplace torn away.

  David looked at the keyhole with a critical gaze. ‘I could try taking a screwdriver to it,’ he said. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Let’s go to bed.’

  I didn’t like the idea of a screwdriver being forced into the door. But it would be a miracle if David managed to locate one. I wondered superstitiously whether, if I had been the one to try, the door would have opened. David kissed me again, on the neck. ‘You’ve been smoking,’ I said, but I didn’t push him away. He mumbled something and put his arms around my waist. When he was younger he’d played football and his body was still muscled and strong, just starting to give way to softness around the middle. He could pick me up easily if he wanted to. We were only a few steps away from the bed. He pulled me over to it and started to undo the buttons of his shirt. I felt a part of myself detach and drift towards the room behind the door, dark and red. I tried to follow it, but the door was a barrier I couldn’t pass, and I gave in to the part of me that stayed. I stayed standing until David tried to push me back onto the bed, playfully, not with real strength, and I put my arms around his neck and let him lift me, relishing that feeling of my own weight against gravity as he scooped me up and laid me down.

  Two

  ‘How could the architects have missed it?’ I asked the next morning. ‘The room, the one behind the closet. Wasn’t it on the plans?’

  David shrugged and finished his coffee. ‘Dig them out if you want to.’

  ‘I just want to make sure it belongs to us,’ I said. Of course it did, I told myself. Even it if was on the other side of the wall, technically part of the structure next door, it had only the one door. There was no way in from the other house.

  ‘Show me later.’

  ‘But you’re going to Melbourne.’ It came out sounding more petulant than I had intended. I inspected a blackened piece of toast, decided it couldn’t be salvaged, threw it away.

  ‘Stupid conference,’ he said, smiling with his lips closed.

  It was the smile, I decided later, when I tried to decode the morning and find the source of how the weekend had seemed to come apart. There was an evenness to the smile that was false somehow, and unfamiliar. In the wake of the smile it felt as though the arrangement of the world had shifted a few vital degrees, enough to seem distorted and strange, but all too legible, if I wanted to understand it, if I wanted to see what was there.

  ‘Just a couple of days,’ he said. The smile changed to something more familiar, the one with the little frown attached to it. He squeezed my arm. I tried to take hold of my strange new sense of doubt, to put it out deliberately, like a tiny fire. Like a burned-out match. Gone.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘And your paper will be fine.’ He had been working on it, revising and rewriting, for weeks, working late into the night and rising early to tinker with it. I’d become used to waking up and finding his side of the bed empty, and hearing the faint sounds of the computer keyboard tapping from his study. ‘And your remarks, whatever it is you’re doing.’

  ‘Response, it’s a response. Anyway. Let’s talk about it when I get back.’

  ‘We don’t need an en suite.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, not listening, rinsing his cup at the sink.

  I glanced up and saw Janie in the doorway, her long, oval face pale against the navy blue of her school blazer in the morning light. With her hair pulled tightly back she looked like a contemplative Renaissance maiden
in a painting. It was difficult to see David in her. I looked for echoes but they always escaped me, and I could find only a thinner, less-finished version of her fair-haired mother, with none of David’s sharp features, his quick clever smile. For the first time I noticed that Janie stood slightly taller than David. This was new. It amazed me that her starved body still managed to grow.

  The air was acrid with the smell of burnt bread. I felt a sudden twinge of anxiety at the thought that Janie had overheard our conversation about the room. ‘I was just about to make some toast, Janie,’ I said. ‘Should I put a piece in for you?’

  Janie sighed. ‘Okay. But I don’t want anything on it.’

  The smoke alarm started up with a piercing bleep.

  ‘The bloody thing’s faulty, I’m telling you,’ David said, and poked it with a broom handle until it quietened. The day before he had criticised the toaster for having such unreliable settings. I loved him for it, his chivalrous impulse to blame the appliances, and it exasperated me at the same time.

  We had been introduced at a publishing awards dinner where one of my designs had won a prize and his latest book had won in some other category. He had left his seat at his publisher’s table after the main course and come to sit next to me through dessert and the final announcements, and had eaten most of my bowl of chocolate mousse along with his own. I knew his face, vaguely, from the television screen, from the series he’d done several years earlier on Australia’s colonial history, and news programs when he was called in occasionally to comment on the destruction of some significant building, or the construction of another. He was more handsome in real life, his face less evenly arranged than it looked on screen. He’d been divorced for a year, and was at the time still half-heartedly conducting the affair with a colleague that had led to the breakup of his marriage. Six months later that was over and I was at his flat most of the nights he didn’t have Janie. She had never met the other woman, although she knew of her existence. It didn’t matter. To Janie I would always be the interloper, the one who tried to replace her mother.